Afghani Aerial Ambush

Using Maya camera projections to create an environment from simple photos

Afghani Aerial Ambush final shot- Click to play

Introduction

I’m a fairly competitive person, which so far has been good for me in learning VFX. When I see a really amazing shot in a film or on television, I don’t have the brains to realize “That was done by teams of dozens of highly skilled artists, with every imaginable resource available to them.” Instead, I usually think “Hey- I could do this!”

So just a few days ago I was reading in FXGuide (a fantastic site, if you’ve never visited) about “Quantum of Solace” and discovered that some of the dogfight sequence was generated entirely in CG. In looking at the photographs and later reading about the same sequence in Cinefex, I realized “Hey- I could do this. Or at least do a no-budget, cheap facsimile of this that will in no realistic way compare with the original!” And so another weekend wasting project was born. I hope you enjoy reading about how the shot was made as much as I enjoyed making it.

The footage of the men running is courtesy of FXPhD, which is another fantastic resource.

Projected Environment in Maya

The Maya scene as a playblast- Click to Play

The key to the whole shot is camera projections. I could have done this in Nuke and probably had a lot easier ability to manipulate the shot quickly, but I decided I wanted to use displacement to try to make the ground plane feel like it really had rocks and shape to it. That meant using Maya.

The first step was to select a stock photo of a mountain that I thought could be interesting to have a helicopter crash into. I then pulled that photograph into Maya as an image plane and created a polygonal plane at the base of the mountain in the photo. Using the photograph as a a guide, I then used the Sculpt Geometry tool to pull the plane into the basic shape of the mountain- the closer you take the time to get to what would appear to be the real shape of the mountain, the more accurate your projection will later be. If you have footage, it would certainly be easier just to matchmove it and build base geometry from the point cloud in PFTrack.

A test of the environment mapping- Click to play

Once I had the mountain basically matching in shape, I projected the original photograph from the camera that I had been using as my viewpoint during the modeling. I then pulled the photograph into CrazyBump and generated a quick normal and displacement map, which I also projected onto the geometry. The displacement map has a tendency to pull the shape of your mountain up and into the background, which obviously breaks the illusion of the projection, so you have to do some test renders and push and pull the base shape to get something works properly.

The background mountains and sky were basically a freebie- I just mapped my original stock photo onto a sphere and stuck it in the back. I have a tendency to get lazy, I’m afraid.

Once my environments were set up I simply imported a stock model of an Apache, created my camera, and animated everything as I liked it.

I rendered several passes from Maya to work with in the composite, but nothing to extravagent- there was a sky pass, a mountain pass, a chopper render, an ambient occlusion pass for the chopper, a pass for the cockpit, a reflection pass for the windows, a pass for the tracers, and a pass for the broken glass after the bullets strike.

Compositing in AfterEffects

The comp was actually fairly straightforward. I just imported all of my various passes, plus some stock explosion footage I purchased long ago, and three bluescreen shots of guys running. I then assembled everything and began the process of making it all match and look as I wanted it to. I exported a .MA with the camera and a few key locations (helicopter, crash site, machine gun site, location of the running people) from Maya to AE in order to allow me to place things properly. The smoke and sparks were created in AE using Trapcode Particular. The running people were placed into the shot in 3D using the camera and location information from Maya. I added a little bit of camera shake to the whole thing, plus some lens distortion, chromatic aberration, grain, and color correction and voila.

The final shot at higher bandwidth- Click to Play

Conclusion

This is certainly on a much lower level than what was seen in the Bond film, but the techniques are the same. I found that you really need a lot of resolution- the Bond guys were shooting their projection plates on IMax stock, and I certainly didn’t have anything near that resolution. That left me having to hide quite a bit.

The technique works really well, and gives you a fairly high degree of camera freedom, as long as you don’t leave the cone of any of your projecting cameras by too much. Using multiple projections for the appropriate angles would work much better. The use of displacement to add realistic detail to the environment was pretty effective- none of the rock detail you see in the final render was modeled at all.

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